


hail o, time draws nigh

by nighty_nyquil



Category: The Arcana (Visual Novel)
Genre: Cunnilingus, F/M, Southern Gothic AU, Vaginal Sex, immolation/self-immolation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-19
Updated: 2019-01-19
Packaged: 2019-10-12 20:46:44
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,062
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17474717
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nighty_nyquil/pseuds/nighty_nyquil
Summary: Real witches are borne of flame and heartache. There is no force between heaven, or hell, or the goddamned delta that can rob him of this fact.





	hail o, time draws nigh

**Author's Note:**

  * For [cedarmoons](https://archiveofourown.org/users/cedarmoons/gifts).



> a long overdue behemoth of a gift for the incomparable cedarmoons (@cedarmoons on tumblr), whose characters i have never failed not to fall deeply and unrepentantly in love with. please go devour her writing and scream at her about it, it fuels the furnace of her soul.
> 
> a southern gothic au that began as a rattling thought in our heads during the wee, dark hours of night, that grew wildly out of control and took on a big old life, dealing with many unfortunate realities that still linger and rot in the modern south. story was written pre-parental reveal, so asra's parents in this fic are not the parents he has in canon.

Woman comes walking up out of the rain and the dark, and, oh, don't she move like she's walking out of her own grave.

+

There's something poisoned and half-feral about the place Asra grew up. Heat and humidity and blood-sucking bugs that put sickness in the veins of man and animal—west nile, encephalitis, dengue, zika. Feverish religion, billboards looming over the highways like the merciless eyes of God, Himself—THE BLOOD OF JESUS CHRIST CLEANSES US OF ALL SIN and EACH OF US WILL FACE GOD. ARE YOU PREPARED?

Bodies are buried in mausoleums and concrete sarcophagi on top of the earth, because when the rain comes (and it always does) graves wash out into the streets. Caskets and skulls float to the surface, sun glinting off coffin lids and brow bones over hollow eye sockets.

He grew up convinced that the ceiling of hell choked with hanging Spanish moss, the walls and floors with kudzu, and that Jesus was a white man in a white suit, a bleached smile like invisible hands were in his mouth to pull his face apart.

(He'd come to figure later that, whether or not hell or God existed, Spanish moss and kudzu were waiting their turn, and the preaching, grandstanding sons and grandsons of the men that painted Jesus' skin white were the same televangelist Anti-Christs that refused to open the doors of their ten million dollar megachurches to those in need.)

(EACH OF US WILL FACE GOD.)

( _ He that giveth unto the poor shall not lack: but he that hideth his eyes shall have many a curse _ .)

(ARE YOU PREPARED?)

It might be the mean, wild part that stayed with him from when he was little—a purebred mutt born in Bayou Sorrel in Iberville Parish, where pairs of eyes flashed in the dark just over the water, where his neighbor's trawler rusted half-sunk at the docks for decades, where an alligator surged to shore and dragged his childhood dog under—but he is riddled with satisfaction whenever bad history rises up on these multi-million dollar Men of God to take their heads off at the shoulders.

Asra isn't Catholic or Baptist, he doubts he's even a Christian, but he swears to Christ that every time one of these men is dethroned, he is beholding the beauty of divine intervention. Christ, carrying a sword, cleansing his temple of moneychangers, and branding them thieves.

+

His parents are dead. That's the only reason he left Bayou Sorrel for New Orleans. His father a translator turned fine pink mist in Afghanistan, his mother an untangleable knot of illnesses turned cancer turned ashes in an urn. Both were gone by the time he'd turned sixteen, and he'd run because he'd be goddamned if he was going to bounce around the foster system another fucking night in a stranger's house.

There were no fewer people to beat his ass for being a queer that wears women's clothing in New Orleans, but there were more places to run, to hide. More drunken, sunburnt tourists looking for something exotic and spooky, and willing to believe anything. Asra, with his purple eyes and bent-cornered, novelty store tarot cards, fit that bill.

He has a real set. A set that whispers, tries to talk to him. Hundreds of years old, pristine and crisp, from a country that hasn't existed in a century.

It lived in a tarnished tin snuff box, his great-great-grandmother's, and his mother put it on the altar she made of her bedroom dresser in the Bayou Sorrel house. It laid among pictures of blood related dead—his mother's mother in her tulle wedding gown, his father's great-grandparents before they left Laos, an infant in repose (great-great-great Aunt Rosetta, died of hay fever when she was only four.)

(His mother's nail tapping the dusty glass, her low moan of a living-dead voice telling him, "That's why her eyes were closed. She was already dead.")

After she died, the cards got loud. Asra tore up the floorboards in his mother's room, wrapped the tin of cards in dozens of rubber bands, spurned it, shoved it away in the dark and the cobwebs with the spiders and the silverfish.

Everyday, he sets up his rickety card table at the same abandoned storefront. The one where a neon sign hangs in the window, still plugged in and buzzing at his back, that reads in yellow tubing:

PSYCHIC

READINGS

 

TAROT & PALM

In the center is a spread hand, palm-up, flanked by blue stars and crescent moons. The hand is colored in a red light district glow, and in its palm is an all-seeing eye in a triangle.

He figures it is free advertising, and it has brought him much business from blistered, peeling tourists too turned around to realize they were no longer in the French Quarter, now heading into unfriendly territory.

Day after day, his routine is selling the image of himself: a mystical, Creole-enough curio, that wears his dead grandmother's jewelry. Cameos on black velvet chokers, strings of pearls that go down to his navel, garnet drop earrings at the lobe and her blue topaz studs in the shell of his ear. Something otherworldly looking, someone with one foot planted firmly on the other side.

Snap and shuffle of his bent, fading cards. Coin tricks, card tricks, shuffling marbles and dice under little cups. Taking strangers' hands in his and telling them about their love lines and life lines because those are the only ones they want to hear about, staring at the glass jewels in the copper rings that turn his fingers green. Three card tarot spreads for five dollars, nine card spreads for ten. Don't tell them what the tower means, assuage their fears of the death card and consider pulling it from the deck without ever doing so.

Close it down, pack it up, retreat in the sweat-damp heat of late-night-early-morning until it's time to crawl back out under the punishing sun to do it again.

But, she comes.

Pink dusk turns to the pitch of midnight, and the sky opens up and hell rains down on New Orleans like Katrina has come again.

Woman comes walking up out of the rain and the dark, and, oh, don't she move like she's walking out of her own grave.

+

Asra hurries to pack up his wares. Stuffs everything he can into his worn-seamed backpack. Flips the card table and kicks the legs when the hinges don't budge.

He is, first, aware of the smell of his childhood.

(Green eyes flashing over murky water. Blinking out, sinking. Guttural hiss, from everywhere and nowhere, sudden violent threat of sound that silences the cicadas and the frogs and the crickets.)

(Cattails and too-still water. Rusted half-sunk trawlers. His dog yelping and screeching as she's dragged under the water. Neighbor firing his bulldog pistol at the sinking shadows. Sulfur stink of gunfire, mineral stink of blood sitting on the surface.)

He is, second, aware of the sound.

Buzzing. Swarm of bees or wasps. The blue-black chitin of mud daubers, stingers sinking into the skin of his shoulder.

His mother's voice in the back of his head—burnt bitter yellow of iodine— _ keep your fucking eyes down _ .

If he was a better son, he would've been better at listening.

He meets eyes the pale of silver dollars laid on the closed lids of the dead. The warmthless feeling of being observed by a full blue moon that does not, and never will care about your name or plight. Bees, small honey bees, crawl over the points of her face. Gather at the space before her ear, the slope of her jaw. One crawls over her faintly blue lips. She pays them no mind, even as they migrate down the line if her neck.

Blue hair, the color the ocean keeps in its unreachable heart, wet with the rain and plastered to an angular face and shoulders. Dripping, dripping.

A dress. Old looking thing, lace collar and cuffs, tinged nicotine-tan at the edges by age. Makes Asra think of a dressmaker's dead daughter in Mexico, body preserved in wax, propped in a store window and pleaded to for luck by brides.

"Is this your shop?" she asks.

(Violent threat of sound that silences all the world.)

( _ Behold, he cometh with clouds; and every eye shall see him, and they also which pierced him: and all kindreds of the earth shall wail because of him. Even so, Amen _ .)

(ARE YOU PREPARED?)

"No," he tells her, struck unmoving, his heart trying to outrun his veins.

Without another word, without a spare glance, she pushes open the shop's door and disappears within.

Asra thinks, as rain pours in his eyes and the neon light in the window blinks out, that he has pushed on that door almost everyday for the last three years, and it has never opened.

+

She is the witch, Ziah. Asra did not know he needed her.

+

After his father died in Afghanistan, his mother tore apart the house in her heartbreak and decided there was not a goddamn thing left for them in Bayou Sorrel. After she moved them to New Orleans and rebuilt her bedroom dresser shrine to picture perfection, Katrina had come. She tried her fucking damnedest to sink the Crescent City and the rest of the Mississippi Delta and gulf coast with a mindless rage unique to only nature.

(He remembers this the brightest, the clearest from before the storm: his mother lit the candles around the water damaged frames and photos. She did not like alter her altar, did not like disturbing the dead. _ Let them rest _ , she told him,  _ they deserve their rest _ .)

(And this he remembers as well: _ you burn your candles too close to them _ , he warned her, but she never listened.)

For three days, Asra and his mother had waited on the roof of the their house in the lower ninth ward, waiting for rescue. Three fucking days.

(He still has scars from the sun poisoning, blisters and cracks over his nose and cheekbones, on his chin and shoulders, the back of his neck and the backs of his arms. Pale divots dug into his skin, oil-slick shine and too-tight texture. Some days he wakes up and swears the skin still shrieks when it pulls.)

(His life has been a series of long waits: months spent waiting for his father to come home from deployment, hours or days spent waiting for the next big crack in his mother's stability, weeks between foster homes and group homes.)

Three days on the roof, three in the superdome, four years in Texas, and one watching the cancer eat his mother.

(The endless one, waiting to stop feeling bad for not feeling worse that she went to sleep, and did not wake up.)

He has already finished the longest period of stagnation in his short lifetime: he has met Ziah, and he will love her, and she, him. That period is over, come and gone like monsoon season and sun poisoning.

All that is left is the burn.

+

Ziah calls the mansion in which she haunts the Lazaret, but never once has she called it home. It reeks of smoke, and from the corner of his eyes, Asra can see fire screeching from the glassless windows, or tapestries being eaten to cinders in flame.

The inferno is one hundred thirty years past, and his throat still scrapes raw beyond her threshold.

He'd dreamt of her out in the murky lands surrounding her rotten fortress. Dreamt of her in her white dress—the lace hems cuffs and collar the same wilted-brown as the petal edges of clipped oleanders—with deep indigo iris flowers in her hair and around her neck.

The next day, he'd seen a pair of enameled earrings—indigo iris flowers on black, painted all on top of gold—and he'd shoved them in his pocket. They were for her, he knew without knowing. He was supposed to bring them to her, among his other gifts.

There are portals. Doors that don't go nowhere if you don't have the touch to end up where you want.

Gates that open to a brick courtyard the size of a crematory retort. Doors that open to blank walls. Outlines of jambs carved into the clapboard sides of empty, tilted churches.

You gotta have the right hands to open them.

And if you got the right hands, sometimes you can make your own doors out of nothing.

Asra uses french chalk to scrawl on the corrugated tin siding of an outbuilding out back of a restaurant. Realizes after the fact that the door he's drawn's coffin-shaped, wide for shoulders, tapered through the bottom. The occult sigils in the center, where the neck would meet chest, could look close to an etching on the lid.

It doesn't matter. He doesn't think about it. No one in his family has been buried in recent memory, all fed into the fire and the flame, relegated to bookshelves or mantelpieces or released as ashes drifting from urn to fist to air.

A hand over top of the sigils, a picture in his mind—Ziah, tall and motheaten and ephemeral, chalking over the scorch marks in her Lazaret, prehistoric voice firm and controlled,  _ In all things, there must be balance. Asra, you walk the shadowed path _ —and he breathes.

He breathes the sticky-hot air of his home, tastes the metallic poison of exhaust and sun-shattered asphalt on his soft palette. He intuitively finds the crack in the levee, and he breaks it.

He has gifts in his backpack, and a witch waiting for him. Light burns under his hand, turns it into a black silhouette against the blue-white, and he does not let the fear consume him as all sound fades into vacuum-nothing around him. He does not let his eyes wander the periphery, where the hidden things reach for him. He does not need the whispers.

He walks the shadowed path, straight into the Lazaret's sunken carriage house.

+

He finds her on the front steps, plucking the tarnished tines of her kalimba, playing music for the slick-skinned and scale-backed creatures of the swamp. The air is dead still and, for a change, unbothered.

The world is listening to her old music, and Asra is compelled to stop and fall in line with it.

There is much about her he doesn't know. Huge stretch of history that's he's never asked after, that she's never offered up. He knows that she is powerful. He knows that he loves her. He knows that the latter has never ever had anything to do with the former.

He's never wanted power, he's only wanted a place he was welcome to belong.

Here, he belongs. Not in the Lazaret—not with the nature creeping through the cracks to reclaim it, not with the eyes of ghost settling ash-soft on his neck and chest. Where Ziah is is where he wishes to remain.

The song finishes out, the last few notes ringing through the quiet air until they fade into the song of crickets and peeping tree frogs, and Ziah takes in a great lungful of oxygen, blinking as if to focus.

Her head swivels a slow turn, kalimba settling in her lap, and she changes.

There has always been a distance to her, his witch Ziah, but her time in his company had—if not banished it, then—dampened it. Pushed it further a ways off, made closeness a little less uncomfortable. That's probably exposure therapy, or cognitive behavioral. Either way, neither flavor he's ever been able to afford.

The feeling of what her eyes can perceive scales down, focusing in on his form, his body standing on the badly-beaten path he's hoed into the overgrown lawn. The tension around her melts, some, lets her shoulders droop, lets her relax into her white gown, body leaning up against one of the massive pillars on the porch. A smile pulls against her mouth, less unsure as the years drip by, grains in an hourglass, but it is small, and she does not show her teeth.

It is enough. Truly, it is enough, especially when she lifts her hand in asking for his as he finally approaches, especially when she says, “Hello, sweet. You have returned to me.”

“I always come back, you know that,” he laughs, quiet, real quiet, slipping his fingers into her palm, kissing from her knuckles to the back of her hand. Turns their joined extremities, and presses his lips against her wrist. Her pulse is there—faint, and old, but alive. He doesn't mean to look at her from under his lashes in that way, but he ends up doing it. “Hard enough staying away as it is. Always missing you so bad, think it might eat me up. Wouldn't even bother leaving the bones.”

Her look is flat and mostly unimpressed, and he doesn't see anything flash across her eyes—no streak of green, no scent of bayou—so he did not tread anywhere unwelcome. She sighs, frowning the littlest bit, and raises her hand to cup his cheek.

“That idea is poor, and I know you realize this,” she chastises him, only lightly. It's an old argument.

“I know you think it is,” he nearly grumbles, and— _ there _ —he sees that dangerous shift, hears the dull, unhappy swarm-sound of bees, sees the crease between her brows, the pallor on her skin. He's stepping too close, so he backs down. Tonight isn't for bickering or bitching or pissing contests to see who can make the other bleed just one drop more—no battles of attrition where defeat is measured in an inch of ground lost.

(This is their oldest feud: that he wants to go where she does not want him to follow.)

( _ To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: … a time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak; a time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace _ .)

(ARE YOU PREPARED?)

“No, no—I’m sorry, hol’ on,” he mutters. Her fingers are tight around his, warning, but he fishes into his pocket for the first of his gifts.

He holds out his loosely clenched fist. “A little something for you,” he says, making his voice a shade off wheedling, a shade off kicked-puppy. Belly-up, full of contrition and mischief. Fingers unfurl, revealing his gift of bejeweled stigmata. Little enameled, gold-backed irises on a black background.

“I saw 'em when I was headin' your way,” he tells her, pleased when she touches them with her fingertips, picks them up. “I couldn't just walk away without getting them for you. Reminds me of the flowers around here.”

Ziah inspects the leverback hook closures, delicate and gold, and the carriage of her shoulders eases. Asra is relieved. The fight's left both of them, and now they can keep moving right on along into whatever is ahead. She wraps a hand around his elbow, and leans down a bit to drop a kiss to the corner of his mouth. “Thank you, Asra. They're...they're very beautiful. I'll wear them tonight,” she tells him.

“I'd like that,” he agrees, turning his head enough to finally, finally kiss her in greeting. They are a slow beat together before the Lazaret, trying to fit a palace's worth of affection into a moment of genteel poverty. He wants to keep his eyes open, but he doesn't, thinking something of bad luck or superstition or something else, and the white mascara on his lashes scratches against the tops of his cheeks.

“Please, come inside,” Ziah sighs, the one to pull them from the moment, a weary and yearning smile diminutive on her lips.

+

The stench of scorch rasps the soft, wet insides of his windpipe, but he doesn't think about it. He doesn't think about the stench beneath the scorch—yellow like iodine, yellow like illness. It's the color of his mother's voices and oncology departments and the contents of pillboxes. Color of kidney failure and urns full of ashes.

He sets his backpack on Ziah's ancient bed, one bedecked in modern sheets and only slightly old crocheted throw blankets, and follows her silhouette behind the sheer dressing screen in the corner.

Never thought to ask how she made her clothes last as long as she has, not over the course of almost two centuries, not when they're made of lace and thread so thin it looks like spider silk, but she strips out of it in pieces—layer by layer.

When she removes the corset, he can feel the fabric peeling away from her skin in the humidity. He can feel her drawing a big breath, and frowning at the sudden discomfort.

He's not helping her undo the laces, but the image of the boning and eyelets cut in relief into her skin over the scars on her back is branded into his forebrain. She doesn't wear a shift or chemise under it. He'd asked, remembering period costuming documentaries he'd devoured in the past, and she'd said one word only.

_ Bandages _ .

Minutes later, she reemerges nigh-unrecognizable, as seamlessly belonging as any one of the New Orleans natives he's seen his entire life. Yoga pants hug the curves of her long legs, a three-quarter sleeve shirt slips off her shoulder and hems off at her hips, and the iris earrings in her lobes fight to glint against the light through the hair she's pulled over one shoulder to braid.

She glances at him from under her thick, black lashes, and he can't decide whether she is anachronistic or the hair tie she finishes off her braid with is. He knows, for certain, that he aches.

"Sweet," she says, inclining her head as she straightens, "would you hand me my shawl?"

+

She wraps constellations around her shoulders when she pulls the shawl around herself, and she follows Asra into the world.

Or, she would, if Asra did not stop at the bottom of the veranda's stairs and hold his arms out and open to her, two stairs up. "It's muddy," he explains.

Ziah arches a brow. "I can glass the ground."

"And the grass is wet."

"I can dry it."

"Hmmm. _Or_ , hear me out, you could let me carry you." His half-lids his eyes, gives his lips a feline curl. Hair falls over his right eye, and he jiggles his arms in a caricature of enticement.

His Ziah can sometimes be too distant to allow herself to be coddled or even cared for. Asra can see it in the green cast that overtakes the silver of her eyes, but he can only see it a fraction of a second, until she rolls them and banishes the color and miles between them.

“If it will make you happy,” she sighs, only lightly-lightly exasperated.

"Pffhaha—happiest fool ever lived," he agrees, slotting his arms around her shoulders and legs when she puts a hand on his shoulder. The maneuver is risky, practically swinging her aloft into a bridal carry, but her arms wind tight around his neck and he's able to keep her airborne. "C'mon,  _ bebé _ , let's get you through that doorway," he tries not to grunt.

She gives him a fierce little look. "Do not drop me,  _ bebé _ ," she mocks, but it's a quiet little warning, even with the sliver of a smile threatening to tug the corner of her mouth.

Deft as sidestepping the sprawling roots of the last and overgrown pecan sprawling to shadow the Lazaret, Asra keeps up a jostling clip and asks, "We goin' to the diner? Or you want we should try some place new, hmm?"

Ziah—ancient and unknowable, strange and so solidly present against his body—peers at him from behind the wall of her arm.

"I would like to see something new."

+

The doorway spits them out behind a store that Asra is familiar with. One that shills piece of crap tourist junk—flip flops and beads and shot glasses and overpriced bottles of hot sauce. They're far from Bourbon Street, but not so far. The air still thrums dull with noise and life, ricocheting off the old brick facades  like they're the bumpers in a pinball machine.

Asra sets Ziah on her feet, and she straightens, though her hand does not leave his upper arm, nor his hand her shoulder blade. She stands too tall, eyes too wide, neck too long. Watching, always watchful in this new world that cropped up when she hadn't been looking. Watchful even in her own dwelling, glare too intent at the corners of rooms and the black void behind doors and windows.

He almost wants to touch her waist, see if he can feel for the boning and structure of her corset. Wants to look, see if her curves have compressed and exaggerated. But he doesn't. He feels her shawl under his fingers, old soft cotton yarn, no sign of lace or mother of pearl buttons.

The past isn't creeping to catch up with her—kudzu vines reclaiming deservedly burned-out antebellum plantation houses—she only needs the moment to pull-in.

And, no, even that's not right. Ziah's got more restraint than he's ever seen, an intensity of it. Her decorum holds the weight of black matter.

She fortifies herself—puts up her walls, her barricades, but the soft hand she leaves on his arm is a fissure in her defenses. She now tries to leave him a crack in the wall to slip through.

The woman that came up out of the rain and the dark loops her arm through his, and would follow him into the world to see something new.

+

It's a good night, not quiet. Asra's city is never quiet outside of stolen moments. They haunt a small corner table in an Indian restaurant, watch the for-the-sake-of-one party rollick and sing and laugh deeper into the dark of night.

Four younger guys in turbans and business casual abandon their messenger bags and plates at their table, leaning into their karaoke with a fervor bordering on religious. They loosen their ties, rake their hands through the air in curled fists. They sing “Bohemian Rhapsody” and “That's What I Like” and “Hit Me Baby One More Time” at the top of their lungs, falling down in laughter and going red-faced hollering at a friend's high notes.

Ziah laughs and hums along and dips naan into curry until Asra leans over and tells her, "We should go up," and she blurts, "No, Asra!"

It is so much easier, so much more gentle than their first joint outing. The night they'd gone to the diner that, to this day, he still cannot find, no matter how hard he looks. The night the skies had broken open, and he was trapped thinking about his first meeting with Ziah, trapped thinking about Katrina, and his flooded living room, and hoisting his mother onto the roof with a foot hold.

His fingernails had broken holding onto the roof shingling, raw and raw and raw, knowing that he couldn't wait for the water to rise any higher, or it would carry him away.

Or, worse, pull him under.

They had been completely alone, sheets of rain slapping against the windows at their booth. It was a torrent, but it didn't wash away the smudgy fingerprints on the outside.

Ziah had been...unhappy that night. He couldn't tell why—too new to reading her, her moods, her nature. But she'd chosen not to shed her dress, the lace looking more and more wilted under the buzzing strip lights in the ceiling. A mud dauber had crawled over the shell of her ear, made its home there for the night. Her hair had begun to drip, going from blue to black.

He'd been a fool. He'd had to ask.  _ What does it feel like? _

Her eyes on him had felt like gun barrels. He'd felt sighted, like his life suddenly began and ended within a scope. “What does what feel like?”

_ Talking to the dead? _

In the moment, he would've called what she did next an act of evil, but it was only his racing heart. She'd overturned her hand, and produced his family's heirloom deck of cards, painted in a country that no longer exists. The strip lights had started to flicker, whispers began scratching at the spot behind his ears.

Katrina, and bedroom dresser shrines, and memento mori, and dead little girls that looked asleep. The lights flicker in a pattern, thu-thrum, thu-thrum, faster and faster. His blood pressure had taken off at a gallop, he felt it in his eyes and his neck.

“Do you want to find out?”

He felt his blood in his fingertips, a coursing surge of iron and plasma, muscles all over clenching. The lights flickered no longer, they pounded, plunging them into pitch black, only to yank them back into blinding fluorescence.

_ Make it stop _ , he'd demanded,  _ whatever the fuck you're doing, cut the shit, Ziah! _

“I am not the one making this happen, Asra,” she warned in a two syllable hiss. “You have noticed this forever, have you not? Glasses breaking, windows spiderwebbing, lights flickering when you enter a room. People are injured when you want them to hurt, because your pain is a  _ living thing _ . This is your doing, and  _ you will undo it _ .”

He couldn't control his breathing, the whispers were turning into shrieks, he couldn't see for the flashing lights blinding him in turns. He'd snatched the deck of cards from Ziah's outstretched palm, and shouted,  _ ENOUGH! _

The waitress had appeared next to their table then, sneering a smudged-lipstick grimace. “Jesus Christ, it's not like y'all had to wait that long. Do I need to ask you to leave?”

Ziah leaned back against the leather booth seat, her eyes calculating, lips slightly pursed, and nodded. He still doesn't know what she'd thought of the entire ordeal.

But, tonight is better. The lights don't flash—they don't even flicker. He takes Ziah's hand and kisses her knuckles, and he grins and breathes deeply when she kisses her indignant laughter into him.

He laughs back, looking at the gleam of her dark hair under the lights, feeling his mouth tingle from the massive portion of vindaloo he’d taken upon himself to eat, and eat, and eat.

Maybe he harbors a part of himself that is half-wild and mean, but he is desperately in love.

The color in Ziah’s face goes down, allowing the freckles dusting the high points of her cheek bones and the bridge of her nose to resurface. Asra thinks of lightning bugs flaring in a black velvet night. The white thread stars on Ziah’s shawl.

He is in love, and in love, and in love.

His mouth tingles, he wants to follow where she will not allow, but she is the one to wipe her lips, and squeeze his knee under the table.

When she has had her fill of food and the city, they leave it behind, passing through another doorway drawn from french chalk on the tin wall of a scrapyard, next to the weathered visage of Christ, bleeding hands outstretched in an offered embrace. He is flanked by a set dressing of hubcaps, car grills, and license plates, all rusted.

“I am tired,” Ziah says, a contented hum carrying her words. “It will be a relief to have our privacy.”

(A banner wraps around the weather-beaten savior,  _ Death is inevitable / It’s your choice _ )

( _ Such is the way of an adulterous woman; she eaeth, and wipeth her mouth, and saith, I have done no wickedness _ .)

(ARE YOU PREPARED?)

“Yeah, definitely,” Asra agrees, dropping his forehead to rest against her shoulder, burning with contentedness when her free hand searches out to twine loosely into his fingers. “I’m headin’ right into a food coma. But I got you more presents.”

Ziah smiles as the doorway opens, bright and blinding, throwing a halo of white around her head and shoulders, her deep water hair. Asra has only ever seen things that titantically beautiful in stained glass, in oil paintings of weeping virgins cradling their dead sons.

“I would think you are trying to buy my favor,” she murmurs. “An unnecessary act, considering that you already possess it.”

“Just want to see you gettin’ treated right, is all,” he yawns.

A lingering moment, she is silent, shrouded by the sound of crickets and the dimmer and dimmer noise of city life. There is no flash of bayou color to her eyes, no scent of still water, no predator growl in her energy. Only silver dollar eyes, softened around the edges. The kiss she presses to the hair over his temple is sweet, considerate, heavy.

“Thank you, sweet,” she, finally, says.

+

Here is how it starts:

(Here is how it always starts, except for at the beginning, when she was the woman come out of the rain and the dark, crossing his path—lucky black cat—on her way to  _ something _ :)

Asra watches from far as she unbraids her hair, he ignores the stench of scorch and the color yellow, and he closes the distance if she is receptive.

Tonight, there are no delicate mother of pearl buttons to fuss with, no yellowed ribbon to unlace. He takes out her iris earrings, sets them in a porcelain saucer on her dresser, and kisses the spot where her jaw meets her neck.

She sighs, low and bedded in comfort.

This is the place where the rest of it—the city, his life, his bent novelty cards, and the iodine-colored ghost of his mother—is far away. Too far to catch him.

"What are you doing, sweet?" she asks.

Asra closes his eyes as she leans back against him, rests his face against her shoulder and wraps his arms around her waist. He sighs and breathes her in and he does not shudder. "Lovin' up on you," he admits.

"Is that so." Her fingers skate over the backs of his hands, laces into his own.

"It's so," he hums, rocking her back and forth slow, gentle. Likes being near to her. Like the tempo of blood moving through her. Vitality and power. Ziah. "Just wanna treat you the way you deserve." He kisses her neck and smiles when she jolts the littlest bit, murmuring a laugh, stretching long to give him more real estate. "I love you so much, Mizi."

Asra remembers the newscasts in the days leading up to Katrina's landfall. He remembers his neighbors (the ones that could afford to) packing up everything and trying to escape. His mother—in a rare moment of calm, of earnest and repentant tenderness—had stood in the front yard at his side, rubbing circles between his shoulder blades.

Her voice hadn't been yellow, it was remorseful and hoarse. “Baby, I'm so sorry I couldn't get us outta here.”

They'd stared into the approaching end of the world, and survived moving through the eye at the end of all things.

When Ziah turns in his arms, hands coming up to cradle his jaw, he sees the lethal center of the storm living solitary and potent in her silver dollar eyes. He would walk into those winds and never fear for his life or his shoul.

“I love you, Asra,” she tells him, quiet surety, stroking his cheekbones now. “And I know that you love me. I do not need told at every turn.”

“But I want to say it. I want you to hear it, every minute of every day.” He swallows. Her hair slides over his arms. “I want you to feel loved.”

"You are not undeserving yourself, Asra," she says, a tenseness underlining her words. That is their smaller, yet no less constant, battle in the midst of the war. Thinking himself unworthy in the midst of wanting to follow where she will not allow. She pulls him closer, hand to the mall of his neck, bringing them together bodily. "I will show you, if you will show me."

"Yes," he groans, pliant and needy and ready to take knee in front of her— _ for _ her, always.

The old halls of the Lazaret are the only things to witness their slow hands doing a slower undressing. Ziah rids him of his shirt, Asra guides her into stepping out of her yoga pants. Layer by layer, until there is nothing between them.

Delta blues play on the phonograph behind them—men mourning into their songs, cracking and popping with age, sadness integral to the notes. Music that was stolen and buried into the foundations of other genres, the names of its creators all but buried with them. All on the wayside, as peripheral as the goldenrod scent of the Lazaret's stained-in unhappiness.

"On the dresser?" Asra asks against Ziah's lips. "You, on the dresser? I want to, wanna—"

"Yes," Ziah nods, dropping a hand from around his neck to hold onto the wooden edge of the dresser at her back. "Yes, I would, let's." Mindlessly, though it turns him into a pillar of flame in ways he wonders if she can feel, she mumbles, "Gorgeous, so gorgeous."

_ Straight into the storm _ , he thinks,  _ wouldn't never look back _ .

She kisses him through the jumbled motion of lifting and hopping that gets her onto the dresser. Sometimes, he can't think for the relief and gratitude that floods him, that her mouth is as hungry as his, that her hands are as greedy. She touches him and feeds the empty spaces he carries, fills them back in with gold and old forces he does not yet understand. She sees something in him that he cannot see for himself.

Asra kneels between her legs, glassy-eyed, pink-mouthed. “Please,” he murmurs, and his breath tickles her knee, “Mizi, I won't let you fall.”

She knows he wouldn't, or he hopes that she does.

“Okay. Yes, Asra,” she tells him, and she lets him guide her legs over his bare shoulders, his exhalations hot on her skin as he draws close. His hands roam up her thighs, arms wrapping in their place when his hands find purchase on the swell of her hip.

The dresser makes an untrustworthy sound, an old wooden creak, and Asra is instantaneous when he squeezes around her legs, asking, “Alright?” He has gone no further than the skin above her knee, and his neck cranes to look up at her face.

Curiously enough, she is. Her eyes are a little wide, but her grip on the dresser is not white-knuckled. A bit shocked, maybe, but not fearful. He will not let her fall, and she trusts him enough to keep that promise. She nods, reaching her left hand down to stroke his hair. “I'm alright.”

He continues, not terribly slow, but slow enough that he's convinced he's denying the both of them. Teasing the both of them. But, oh, when his mouth finds her sex, he wastes no time. With her legs around his shoulder, now nearly squeezing around his neck, with her hands gripping the edge of the dresser for balance, he plunges.

Mouth hot on the curl of midnight hair between her legs, he dips his tongue between her lips and circles her clit, moving swiftly and directly to seal his lips around the bud and suck so powerfully Ziah moans and bucks against his face, her skin running forge-hot and turning red-orange-white-and-blue under his touch. Her fingers clench in his hair, and she hisses, squeezing her thighs around his head.

Asra thinks misheard, misremembered lyrics— _ a beautiful way to die _ .

He uses his tongue to stimulate her as much as he humanly can, until his jaw aches and his neck twinges, laving between her labia, dashing over her clit, teasing her entrance and dipping into it as deeply as anatomy will allow. Her hitched breathes turn into billowing gasps, her legs beginning to tremble and twitch. Her hands take turns taking flight, wrapping in his hair or skin like she's planting a flag.

“As—Asra,” she wheezes, near hiccuping, her body a symphony of impulses indulged, “like that. Like that,  _ yes _ , y-yeah!”

By the time they'd been undressed, he'd been on the north side of half-hard. Now, he can feel his heartbeat in his hard-on, resounding through his body like a bass line, striking up through his spine hammer-on-anvil. He's dripping, he knows, with a delightful kind of harmless and pale shame that leans more toward thrill. 

He wonders if he'll cum like this, just by eating her out, tasting her, receiving her reactions through bodily telegraphing. He wants to, heat curling in his stomach like zero gravity flame, and he doesn't. He wants to feel her around him. He wants her to tell him what to do, when to finish.

“ _ Asra _ !”

Asra had lost track of himself, his actions, had driven Ziah right up to the edge, and straight over it. Her shout is the only warning he gets before she forces his face into her, riding out her orgasm on his mouth, and Asra lets himself get further lost in it. Goes half-lidded, allows himself to be used and throws himself wholeheartedly into the effort.

Her gasps come rapid-fire, cut through with curses and encouragement. Her finish is a hot gush over his chin, and he moans, base and utterly lacking any pretense of shame. His cock twitches dangerously, and he's barely able to blunt-force his mind into a barren enough space to keep from finishing on his own.

It leaves him breathing open-mouthed and heaving, almost confused to how he'd gotten here. Ziah's chest roses and falls in unison, jolting every so often as if she endures small electric jumps over her skin.

Ragged, she takes his hands and orders him, “Come here. Meet my level, Asra.”

He rises obediently, but he bucks and keens when her hand closes around his erection, grip already damnably slickened by her magic. He can't fathom the number of spells she's learned over the long walk of her life, and that sentiment doubles and triples down when she squeezes his cock almost to the point of pain, almost to the point of winding him.

He won't last long this way. There is no way he can. He drops a hand on her wrist, almost whimpers and undeniably pleads, lost and punchdrunk, “ _ Mizi… _ ”

“Tell me how you want to finish,” she purrs, stroking his length with a purpose that is either going to drive him mad or kill him. “In my hand? My mouth? On my stomach?” She gives a pause to consider, drawing his lips to hers by a guiding hand on his chin. A calculated after thought, she gives him the option, “In me?”

Were he not so close to her mouth, let alone her face, he would've coughed. But the mere thought of finishing in her is almost too much, making his harebrain short circuit, his body protest as he stammers, “ _ Stopstopstoptooclose _ —”

And he could scream and tear his hair out when she listens. The inertia of his near-miss orgasm hits him like an uppercut, allowing their surroundings back into his awareness with too much momentum. The lights are too bright, the music is too loud, the air is too hot.

She grins, crooked teeth on display for him and him alone.

“I thought that might throw you.”

“No fuckin’ kidding,” he half-laughs, shaking his head.

“You never told me how you wanted to to finish,” she taunts him, pushing hair off her shoulder with her dry hand, next using it to stroke his hands that like palm-flat on the dresser. He hadn't even realized. “Is there a way you want to do it?”

Not really. Any way would be plenty enough for him. To be close is all he desires.

“Want we should just see how it goes?” he asks. “I'd be happy just feeling you.”

The grin narrows, a look as close to playful as he's ever seen on her. Sweat makes her shoulders and the tops of her breasts gleam, throws highlights and lowlights on the rolls of her soft belly. Forgotten kind of goddess, one he doesn't have a name for.

“Then let's get back to it. Is that agreeable?”

More than.

He follows the lead she dangles him by, coming in close when she beckons, sighing when she takes him again by the cock and directs him between her folds, and deeper. His eyes could roll in the back of his head, and he thinks he wouldn't have lasted one pathetic second had she not set the pace with her legs around his hips.

Ziah cups his chin, pushes his face back, makes him crane his neck. Just enough to see, just enough to deny. No cruelty in her expression, only admiration. He thinks his hips will lose rhythm. He thinks his heart will lose pace. Break through his ribs, find its way into the mouth of an alligator, stay sunken in its stomach like a stone, stay hidden and moving under the dark waters.

It would be like staying with her. He would like that—to stay here, with her, in her world. He'd like to permanently live in the spaces between her fingers, under her tongue, at the tip of her eyelashes.

He would not be apart from her. If he had his way, he would never leave, goddamned be the consequences. He does not want to—he  _ will not  _ go back to a life where he is alone. Here, having known her, loving her—he is not alone, not anymore, not even when he is by himself.

A woman came walking up out of the rain and the dark, and, oh, didn't she move like she was walking out of her own grave, and— _ god dammit _ —she hadn't intended to, but she had  _ found him _ . And she will not let him lead her life; will not let him rot in isolation, listening to the world bulging and growing in sickly ways, outpacing him without a thought toward concern.

She loves him, and she will not let him wrap the walls of the Lazaret around himself like a shawl. She loves him, and she will set foot into the world because of it.

“Mi-Mizi, I'm,” he can't find the words, too lost in the molten feeling infecting every fiber of his being, starting within his heart and spreading-spreading-spreading.

“Yes,” she breathes, as raggedly as he is, and only now does he again notice the color darkening her cheeks, the tremor through her legs and stomach. “I know, I know. When you're ready—whenever you're ready sweet.”

That's all it takes. Whatever leash is on him is dropped, and he loses sense of decorum and manners. The dresser creaks, all of the detritus of a long life rattling on top as he fucks her, hands and mouth all over, begging for direction and receiving none. Instead, Ziah brings his forehead to hers, encouraging him, telling him how good he feels, how badly she wants to see him unspun and mindless. How close she is, how she wants to cum with his cock inside her.

If he had two brain cells to rub together, he would be furious that he hits orgasm the moment he accidentally slips out of her. He spills on the length of her thigh, and he swears they both howl in indignation.

_ Christ, Jesus Christ, Jesus fucking Christ _ , he thinks, stupid and blasphemous. His legs shake, so do his arms, his fucking ribs. He could've done better, lasted longer, been less consumed.

“Can you finish again?” he slurs against the skin of her shoulder, bones all gone. “Wanna make you cum, if y'can.”

“I can—I can, but—quickly, Asra,” she breathes, nails digging into his arms.”Asra, please.”

Smothering the last shattering fractals of his orgasm, he pulls her against his side, her cunt against his hip, his hand between her legs, hoarse encouragement decanting from his mouth, free hand wrapped around her back and directing her rhythm.

She drops her face against his temple, wraps get arms around his neck and squeezes--python climbing tree—and, if Asra was in a clearer mindset, he would laugh too think at the phrase that comes unbidden to his thoughts.

Ziah absolutely rides him like she stole him.

(He wishes she would.)

Her second orgasm doesn't have near the force of her first, making her sway like a drunkard as opposed to thoroughly rocking her to the foundation. A weak laugh escapes her as she toys with the hair at the nape of his neck, turns speculative after he kisses her (almost chaste, light and airy) and begins to resume his genuflection.

“Wherever are you going?” she queries, without real or intense interest.

“Y'make a mess,” he says, ignoring the way the floorboards have begun to make his knees sore, “s'only right you clean it up.”

Ziah says nothing. Only sighs, lovely and lovesick, stroking his hair as he licks his spend off her thigh and hip. Bitter taste on his tongue, deep but not yellow, and her skin underneath it, salt across doorway floors, brick dust sifting through loose fingers,  _ protection _ . It—all of it—could almost lull him to sleep.

“Are staying the night?” she asks, sleepy, slow. “I would like it if you did.”

(Straight into the storm, would never look back.)

( _ Love suffereth long, and is kind; love envieth not; love vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up / Doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil; / … Beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things. _ )

(Are you prepared?)

“Yeah, I am.”

+

The time comes, and he returns to the lower ninth ward haunted house, and the bedroom dresser shrine.

He lights candles, always too close to the cobwebs, so huge and overgrown now as to be their own persons in the room. Ghosts huddled in the corners, veils drooping between the doorways.

He lights the candles—four of them, and five and six and seven of them now, some wicks stubborn until he forces them to obey and catch by his old, hard-learned magic—and he contemplates generations of frozen dead. His mother and father stand among them now, forever frozen in newly-freed bliss on the steps of the Bayou Sorrel stoop.

There is a Polaroid in his pocket. Bent, fading through the crease. He only needs to put it with the others. The is time, yet, that needs to be waited. Words to be said, perhaps; lives to be let go, unavoidably.

There is sadness and pain housed here, generations of it. He thinks of his pink mist father, his iodine yellow mother, aches and rages to himself they deserved their freedom. Deserved better than what they got.

He thinks of Ziah, and all the secrets she is not ready to share with him. He thinks of her corset cutting welts into her skin. He thinks of bandages. He thinks of the Lazaret and scorch scent and sickness.

The scars on her back, the anger it kindles within him.

(A cobweb catches flame, and,  _ oh _ , it's burning faster than he imagined.)

He sets the Polaroid of himself on the altar. A spindly teenager, frowning, eyes like empty gutters, broken levees. He frees himself, feels the heat on his neck and the backs of his legs.

(Sun poisoning; blisters and broken nails, merciless sun and wind chopping off the water.)

The walls catch fire. The carpet. The furniture.

The shrine, the picture perfect altar, all the ghosts that wallow within.

The ruins of his life, an inferno.

His body, an effigy.

The fire engulfs him, and he screams.

+

Real witches are borne of flame and heartache. There is no force between heaven, or hell, or the goddamned delta that can rob him of this fact.

+

Witch comes walking up out of the gunmetal morning and the smoke, and, oh, don't she move like she's walking her way to his grave.

The cinders behind Asra are cold and wet, drowned by the hoses of rescue crews. An impossible house fire, refusing to go out for hours and hours, no evidence of the body of someone neighbors swore they saw entering.

They would never find one. A body cannot endure the temperatures that roared through the night, not even boneor tooth.

It doesn't matter. Asra sits on the burnt concrete steps of what remains of the lower ninth ward house, ignorant to the stench of soot and scorch that shrouds him like a snowfall of soft ash. He turns his heirloom cards, reading his own fortunes in the faces and voices of animals, and he does not try to track the flash of exposed bone or charred flesh on the backs of his hands he sometimes catches from his periphery.

The witch Ziah strolls to a stop on his walkway, stepping carefully around a blackened two-by-four that had once supported the roof.

There is no anger in her. Maybe a sense of melancholy, maybe a hint of weariness, but not anger. “Did you mean to do it?”

“No. Or. Hmm.” He does not try for flirty. He is a new thing, spectacular and terrifying. When he'd awoken standing in the ashes, a murder of crows had screamed and taken flight. He thought they'd blackened the sky, but he'd only closed his eyes and the sky darkened to his wishes. He is a little afraid of himself. “I don't think I did.”

Ziah settles next to him on the porch, wearing yoga pants and the iris earrings. When he tucks a strand of ocean colored hair behind her ear, she leans into the touch. When she looks at him, there is a faint tinge of green to her eyes that does not budge. He wonders if his eyes carry a shade as well.

“Can you understand the cards?” she asks.

(The tower, six of pentacles, the High Priestess.)

( _ And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away. _ )

(ARE YOU PREPARED?)


End file.
